Kameron Hurley, the Hugo and Locus Award-winning author of Stars Are Legion (2017), The Geek Feminist Revolution (2016), the Worldbreaker Saga, and The God’s War Trilogy.

In response to the popularity of cyberspace disembodiment of the 80s and 90s, SFF is increasingly concerned with exploring the materiality of bodies. SFF literature, film, television and video games frequently explore how experiences of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and disability inform the construction of identity and influence lived experience; question what it means to be or exceed the human; and consider the agency and nature of nonhuman bodies. This conference will explore the ways in which the body is a focus in SFF, and how the experience and representation of bodies inform how we understand human, post-human, and non-human subjects, and their positionality within material and cultural settings.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers—or panels consisting of three 20-minute papers—addressing topics that include but are not limited to the following:

gender identity

sexuality

race and ethnicity

representations of disability

body modification, cyborgs, clones

post-human and non-human embodiment

technology and the body

metamorphosis and hybridity

bodily experiences of environmental crisis

bodies, space, and geography

pregnancy, birth, aging, death and dying

bodily containment (in spaceships, or exo-skeletons)

environments as bodies, sentient ecological networks

bodily manifestations of the soul or spirit

Please send inquiries and proposals of 250-500 words (including a title, your institutional affiliation, and a bio of 100 words or less) to sffembodimentconference2018@gmail.com by December 31st, 2017. We welcome proposals from researchers of all levels, including graduate students and independent scholars.